December 9, 2008

Even if you don't play the bass, this is still nice. This song is, as my dad would say, is fabulous! Enjoy this lesson from a guy who really nails it, note for note (although I'm not sure I agree with all his harmonic embeleshments).

As with most of the songs on Haircut 100's debut album, “Pelican West,” this classic tune evokes in me some extremely vivid, happy memories from the early 80s. Les Nemes, whose style I sought to emulate somewhat with my own bass playing back then, absolutely kills on this track from the band's first of only two albums — major bummer that.

I'm not sure who this musician is, who's providing this tasty video tutorial, but he knows what he's doing.

I'll be doing the second hour of Q&A today. If you'd like to call in, the number is 888-318-7884, and if you don't live in an area with Catholic radio, you can listen online at the Catholic Answers website (click the “Listen Live” thingamabob to launch the stream).

Don't forget! Tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET. “See” you then.

I will ALSO be guesting on the Catholic Answers Live show, at 7:00 p.m. ET, on Thursday, December 11th, and on Tuesday, December 16th at 7:00 p.m. ET. All the above info applies to those shows, too.

Read this incisive article about the gross double-standard in the American mainstream press in how they covered the recent terror attacks in Bombay. Here's a snippet:

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:

"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."

Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".

Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."

Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.

The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?

Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"

Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.

Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place. . . . ” (continue reading)

The unnamed canon lawyer whose opinion that, yes, women are still obliged to wear them (even if virtually none do anymore), critiques the contrary opinion, advanced by Father John Zuhlsdorf, canonist Ed Peters, and Jimmy Akin. Even though I have long been of the opinion that the Church no longer requires this custom, at least not at Novus Ordo Masses, I must admit that this article has gone a long way toward convincing me that I have been wrong about this. The fact that “nobody does this anymore” is not a good reason not to observe this venerable Catholic custom.

I do, however, have a respectful complaint for the proprietor of the St. Louis Catholic blog (who goes by “Tinman” rather than his real name), and that is: It is a mistake for you not to name the canon lawyer whom you quote and whom you refer to only as “an out-of-state canonist.” There's no reason that I can see why he should not be named, especially since he publically critiques others by name. That seems unjust to me. The unnamed canonist's argument has great merit, but its effects are blunted by his remaining anonymous.